Last year at an historic concert at Radio City Music Hall, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr launched the David Lynch Foundation’s “Change Begins Within” global outreach to teach at-risk adolescents and teens stress-reducing meditation. Since then, nearly 150,000 inner-city students have begun utilizing these techniques to eliminate traumatic stress that undermines academic achievement and short-circuits lives. These students have dramatically better test scores, grades, and graduation rates while drop out rates, suspensions, and expulsions have greatly decreased. The program has the full-hearted support of superintendents, principals, faculty, students, and parents.

More groups of people from all walks of life have come to embrace our program, including veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and their families; homeless adults; children from the streets of Harlem and East LA; American Indians subsisting on impoverished reservations; and incarcerated men and women locked away in maximum security penitentiaries. And the demand has never been greater in New York City, in particular among local schools, veterans groups, and homeless shelter re-entry programs.

I am proud to invite you to the second “Change Begins Within” benefit on Monday December 13, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Russell Brand, Clint Eastwood, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Katy Perry, Russell Simmons, myself, and other very special guests will be part of a very different and exciting evening which lays out as follows:

6:30 p.m. — Great Hall
Cocktail reception

7:30 p.m. — The Grace Rainey
Rogers Auditorium
Find out directly from Dr. Oz how you can overcome the build-up of stress (holiday and otherwise) in your own life and hear from Russell, Clint, Katy, and Russell how combat-frayed veterans, inner-city students and New York’s homeless are overcoming the traumatic stresses of their lives.

8:30 p.m. — The Temple of Dendur
in the Sackler Wing
in all its mystic beauty will be the setting for dinner with amazing guest entertainment.

I hope you will be part of this extraordinary event and discover firsthand why change begins within. Let it begin with you.